The IGP Chronicles Part 3: NVIDIA's GeForce 9300
by Anand Lal Shimpi & Gary Key on October 15, 2008 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
Blu-ray Playback Quality and Performance
We expected Intel's G45 to be the holy grail of HTPC chipsets; unfortunately, driver limitations kept it from fulfilling that role. While the verdict is still out on what G45 may become, Intel's track record with taking care of the HTPC space with its chipsets hasn't been great, as Intel's own blogger will readily admit. (Who, by the way, is an excellent addition to Intel. While the message he carries may not be the most popular within Intel, his understanding of the market is top notch - promote this guy!)
Thus we turn to NVIDIA's GeForce 9300 for hope. Prior to today, your best bet for a solid HTPC solution was to buy an Intel G45 or P45 based motherboard and stick a Radeon HD 4550 in a vacant PCIe slot for proper HDMI, HDCP and 8-channel LPCM support without any issues. Does NVIDIA's GeForce 9300 change that?
An astounding yes.
The Blu-ray decode quality of the GeForce 9300 is identical to the GeForce 8200, which in turn is identical to the G45 and AMD's 780G - as you'd expect. The comparison below is the one we used from Part 2 of the IGP Chronicles:
We've also got full hardware decode for MPEG-2, VC-1 and H.264 on the GPU itself, which results in very low CPU utilization numbers while playing back Blu-ray and other supported HD content:
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yehuda - Wednesday, October 15, 2008 - link
Thanks Anand and Gary for all your work on this article. Do you know if the Gigabyte GA-E7AUM-DS2H board is coming out with the others?kevinkreiser - Wednesday, October 15, 2008 - link
Where's the discussion about hybrid-sli drivers/benchmarks? A follow-up article with the tests still in progress?This german review has hybrid-sli benchmarks but they omit a discussion about drivers or even how you set it up, they just show numbers.
http://www.computerbase.de/artikel/hardware/mainbo...">http://www.computerbase.de/artikel/hard...schnitt_...
kevinkreiser - Wednesday, October 15, 2008 - link
Wait my mistake, actually the german article mentions in the conclusion that they experienced bugginess with the hybrid-sli driver and sometimes games don't start or run really slow. Any comments from you guys at anandtech?Visual - Wednesday, October 15, 2008 - link
Does nVidia intend to have this GPU on an AMD chipset at all, or have they given up competing there?Can we expect this chipset to be used in Intel laptops (other than Apple), and will they still get the Centrino brand? If Intel insists on requiring their own chipsets for that brand, I'm afraid laptop manufacturers will not use it despite its obvious advantages.
Does something like hybrid-SLI work on this chipset, to get better performance from a 9400/9500/9600GT card?
From the Apple adverts it seems dynamic switching between the IGP and stand-alone GPU will be a reality in its laptops... is that the case also with the desktop version that you test today? I guess you'd have mentioned it if it were... Is it at least planned with future drivers or something?
R3MF - Wednesday, October 15, 2008 - link
Good point about the Centrino brand, that may well make laptop manufacturers wary of this chipset, just because of the power of the Centrino brand.On the other hand, this may be a very good reason for nVidia to push the Via Nano netbook platform via big companies like HP which have a strong brand quality of their own.
JarredWalton - Wednesday, October 15, 2008 - link
The Hybrid Power tech (switching between IGP and discrete GPU) should be available in this chipset; support for the feature still remains with the motherboard/notebook vendors, however. I'm still waiting for my first Windows notebook to feature hybrid power (which is also available with G45 chipsets... though why you'd want G45 over GF9300 is a tough question to answer; oh, right: Centrino 2!) You're right: Centrino as a brand is so powerful that NVIDIA can have the best solution in every way and still not see much uptake. We'll have to see how it goes....danielgr - Thursday, October 16, 2008 - link
It's funny... it seems that it's always the same, and Apple has to introduce something for people to get to know it...Sony has been selling "hybrid-power" laptops for about 2 years now... (here is an old laptop running Intel's 965GM chipset with NVIDIA 8400M graphics and "the magic switch"), together with LED displays, SSD drives...
Their current offer gets you Centrino2+DDR3, BD, Raid-SSD, HybridStuff with Nvidia 9300M GS on Intel's GM45, Wide Gammut LED display, and still weights around 1.5Kg with 7.5-11h of autonomy...
http://www.vaio.sony.co.jp/Products/Z1/feat1.html">http://www.vaio.sony.co.jp/Products/Z1/feat1.html
danielgr - Thursday, October 16, 2008 - link
Forgot the link to the "old_laptop":http://www.vaio.sony.co.jp/Products/SZ6/feat2.html">http://www.vaio.sony.co.jp/Products/SZ6/feat2.html
Gary Key - Wednesday, October 15, 2008 - link
We will be updating the article shortly. It has been an all night meeting marathon with the motherboard suppliers and NVIDIA trying to get answers on the AHCI problems, memory performance, and other minor items we discovered. ASUS sent us a new BIOS that we will test in a couple of hours, the AHCI problems have diminished greatly after yet another clean install of Vista SP1 (still have some minor pauses during heavy drive load), and we feel safe enough in taking a detailed look at the motherboards in a couple of days.That said, NVIDIA surprised us with this chipset, probably the best one (all around) on the market for HTPC setups and casual gaming performance now. That is not to take anything away from the AMD platforms, personally I am running a 8750 and GF8200 hooked up to a new 52" LCD, if the price was right, the 9350e is a really sweet processor that will greatly lower power requirements on the AMD side, as we will see next week. Hopefully, AMD will respond with multi-channel LPCM output in their IG chipset. If that is not important, the 780g/790GX is great. ;)
Zstream - Wednesday, October 15, 2008 - link
30% cpu utilization for a HTPC is good? Umm, I guess I come from a different perspective then.Quite a few HTPC's are for streaming, so with this chipset it is almost impossible to stream data while watching what you are streaming.
Did I misunderstand something here or what?